McCain: US founded as a Christian nation

The cynical part of me hears the distinct sound of pandering here, but given all his qualifiers, Sen. McCain may actually believe that the Constitution establishes a "Christian nation" in some nebulous way that doesn't involve actually using the word "Christian" in any place in said document.

Yes, most Americans are now and since the founding have been nominally Christian. No serious person disputes that. Whether that means that specifically Christian doctrines ought to influence the laws or enforcement thereof in the US is an entirely different matter, and that's generally what people are quibbling about in the whole "Christian nation" debate.

My belief is that (in as much as is possible) reason, logic, and empiricism, tempered by a broadly-defined humanist ethical system, should guide our lawmaking and enforcement. Clearly, many from both sides of the aisle disagree.

Egads, my last post was terrible. ;-)

The serious question in any debate should be "is this the right thing to do", and not "is this the Christian thing to do." That a Christian doctrinally or faithfully also considers it right is not the issue, or should not be the issue.

Saying we are a Christian nation, with enough qualifiers, is a reasonable argument. I'm just disappointed that McCain--who was once an independent, Maverick voice--has just become another pandering presidential candidate. The man who once was willing to stand up to the likes of Falwell and Robertson has just become another lap dog to the religious right.

"Republikud Party?"

Can't make a point without throwing out a vaguely anti-Jewish jibe, can you?

So your point is lost. All points that include bigotry are to be flushed down the toilet.

Franklin, I gotta admit my intention in pulling up that Supreme Court quote was half to get a rise out of folks.

That said, it's worth noting that the Court clearly found it unobjectionable and unremarkable that laws in a mostly Christian country are shaped by Christian principles. That does NOT, of course, mean, that our laws are subject to the approval or disapproval of any Church or of Christians (or other religious believers) in general.

It does mean, however, that a mostly Christian population is free, under our democratic Constitution, to enact generally applicable Sunday closing laws or similar regulations that are in harmony with Christian doctrine and custom. If some people do not like that, the proper remedy is to lobby the legislature, town council, etc. to change those laws. The fact that many Christians support such laws does not make them an unconstitutional establishment of religion.

I'm also in agreement with Simon's comments, which are far less verbose than mine.

Simon, Lucius, Hays: well said, all of you, and points well taken.

Doesn't mean I'm accepting them without caveat. But you likely expected that from me, eh? :-D

Simon, the rise I experience is in the hair-splitting -- from my POV -- you all are engaging in. Blue laws have indeed been rescinded exactly as Hays suggested they should be. Without having any documentation available to me showing that it could apply here (preferring to post rather than research, confessing my laziness), there is also the doctrine of preemption. I am familiar with it in only a narrow area of the law (ERISA), so my position is admittedly arguable at least on that basis.

I'll remind you at this point, too, that I am not a lawyer. I knew ERISA for professional reasons, not from studying it as a lawyer.

I submit that without the advocacy of a federal "higher power", the only effective recourse for, say, a non-Christian group faced with Christian hegemony in the laws of their state, is to relocate to another state that doesn't have those laws, and pray to their deity-of-choice that it doesn't happen there.

Majority rule can be insidious, and Tocqueville's "tyranny of the majority" is exactly what the Constitution exists to prevent. Blue laws, arguably, are an example of that tyranny. I hasten to add that while such laws can be seen as benign, and I acknowledge that intent, they can be anything but benign in practice. The only power a minority can have in that situation is from federal preemption.

Finally, I agree that if I were to assert the ideas above, I'd likely be wrong in the literal sense. I'm aiming more for the abstract here.

Brad's certainly right that business interests were the driving force behind repeal of blue laws. I doubt that many churches actively supported their repeal, but by the same token there are plenty of Christians who did not care about them.

It should be noted, by the way, that Christian churches take a wide variety of approaches toward Sunday closings. Congregationalists and Presbyterians traditionally pressed for cessation of nearly all non-religious activity on Sunday. Roman Catholics, Lutherans and others traditionally regarded Sunday as a day of family-oriented recreation, thus favoring business closings but not prohibitions on sports, entertainment, etc. Thus the strict blue laws of New England and the mid-Atlantic were also undermined by demographic change in those regions in the 20th century.

Franklin, hang on just a second.

I'm puzzled by your mention of blue laws, especially since the Sabbath originates with Moses' revelation.

You have written on several occasions that you have Jewish blood. Why aren't your words against Jewish tradition?

Franklin,

It wasn't just commerce that changed the Blue Laws in Pennsylvania -- it was also demographics. Those laws were enacted by the Quakers and Calvinists who once dominated public life in PA. Blue laws in the east were much stricter than the Sunday laws of places like Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, which were originally settled heavily by German and Irish immigrants.

As you note, by your time SE PA was majority Catholic, which meant the old social consensus in favor of the strict blue laws could no longer be sustained.

I was a religious freedom wonk even before law school, but law school refined my understanding. I've been slow coming to some of my convictions, but I like to think it's the development of wisdom rather than a plodding intellect.
Conviction 1: One of our sages said "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." There are no set-it-and-forget-it self-enforcing principles to balance the religious liberty of the minority against the right of the majority to self-governance. We'll be admonishing the group in power not to abuse its power to violate the consciences of the minority for a long, long time to come.
Conviction 2: Court have little choice, when they're functioning well, but to try articulating principles; that's how we get precedent instead of arbitrary decisions. One of my frequent objections to Supreme Court decisions is that they seem too ad hoc, unable to give real guidance to lower courts.
Conviction 3: Those commenters who note much greater latitude for the states until Everson in 1947 are quite right. Massachusetts had an established Church until the 1830s, well after adoption of the Bill of Rights, and it fell ultimately because the Calvinists, God bless 'em, couldn't stomach the unitarian takeover of the established Congregational Church. (No doubt it's not quite that simple; history never is. That's just a thumbnail sketch.) Nobody thought Massachusetts was acting unconstitutionally even as a conviction grew that Establishment might be imprudent.
Since I don't believe in a Constitution that mutates to fit its words to the druthers of the lawyer class in each generation, I think that's the way things should have remained, though I acknowledge the difficulty of "turning back the clock." A lot of the Court's decisions under the incorporation doctrine (i.e., the 14th amendment makes much of the Bill of Rights applicable to the States through its guarantees of due process and equal protection) seem motivated by the Lincolnesque desire to transform "united States" into "Unitedstates" - a single, homogenous entity, worthy to became the world's sole superpower and thus to exercise important meddling like spreading Democracy to the heathen and other echoes of Manifest Destiny.
Propensity 1: Lucius is on the right track, I think, when he says "laws based on religion should be held constitutional by the Supreme Court, as long as the laws do not mandate creedal confession, church attendance or monetary support of a church, or otherwise violate Bill of Rights requirements." But I would take it further: I suggest that the Court stop scrutinizing the motivation behind laws so as to smack down legislation just because legislators were allegedly up to something sneaky.
I lean that way because, as I watch the court try to decide whether a law is "based on religion" (in Lucius' phrase) or otherwise to discern an impermissible motive, I see it drawing lines that have a lot more to do with their social class and what they think is low-class and yucky than with any principle I can discern. Thus we get Justice Kennedy saying that a law can have no motive but a bare desire to harm this group or that, or the Massachusetts Supreme Court (contra most courts that have now looked at the question) denying that there can be any rational basis whatever for limiting marriage to male-female pairs. If I may borrow a page from those who try to get their political goals by whining, I feel soooo Personally Violated and Disrespected when Courts say things like that. Sniff, sniff.
But that's just a leaning; their may be insurmountable problems I can't see. Eternal vigilance, y'all!
Conviction 4: Courts should avoid - or be very careful when they don't avoid - trying to discern religious motivation behind a law BECAUSE it is not always possible to separate religiously-informed convictions from other, permitted worldviews. At the margins, it's not too hard. Laws forbidding service of meat, dairy and oil on Wednesdays and Fridays, or forbidding possession of Icons would be fairly easy cases, I think. But healthy religion is far more than sets of rules from holy books superimposed over objective reality. It goes all the way to the bone. It "transforms to mind" to quote Apostle Paul to the Romans.
I won't use the term "Christian anthropology" as if it were unitary - there are thousands of denominations with varying views, after all - but I cannot see how we can avoid, while exercising salutary "eternal vigilance," religious people trying to use laws to promote authentic human thriving ACCORDING TO THEIR VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE (sorry if that looks like screaming; I don't know how to use hypertext tags). Isn't that what the Christian anti-slavery activists were doing, for instance?
'Nuff said. Too much said. "I'm just sayin' ..." seems to be the closing for this kind of musing.

Prohibition ended because the government really needed tax money, that is the public reason. The unspoken reason was that in some parts of the country it was unenforcable, not only because of offical corruption like in Chicago or New York, but because anyone charged with enforcing it was killed, like in Southern Illinois. In those areas it was a literal civil war and the government was losing.

Now, what has this to do with the separation of church and state? The Founders thought of themselves as Christians. That was their culture and there was actually no way they could think of themselves otherwise at that point in history. Even Tom Jefferson would have gagged at the thought of embracing Buddhism. But this ain't 1776 any more! For the sake of civil peace, government has to stay out of religion unless people are doing really nasty things with it, like seducing the choirboys or sacrificing their in-laws (well,maybe sacrificing in-laws should be legal but I can't imagine the gods wanting mine). People are just not on the same page, often not even on the same planet! And if the right buttons are pushed, they are all to willing to start shooting.

One civil war over a disagreement on interpreting the Bible was enough.

Just a couple of observations:

1. By 1778, all the colonies had officially disestablished their churches. In only four did small vestiges of the old establishment hang on; Connecticut was the second to last to abolish an odd, voluntary system by which the state would collect tithes, in 1819. Massachussetts clung on to the same tiny vestige until 1833. All other parts of state establishment had been long abolished, and it's not a good argument to claim that the abolished laws still existed or suggested any sort of endorsement of state establishment of religion, after 1778. Madison and Jefferson addressed the issue directly in their correspondence in 1787 and 1788, with Madison arguing that a Bill of Rights was technincally unnecessary since every state already had one, and specifcally on the issue of religious freedom, noting that all states protected worship and had abolished their state faiths.

2. The case involving the Church of the Holy Trinity was not a religion case. The issue was immigration, and specifically, immigration of labor. The holding was that a Christian nation may indeed ban all people of color from blue color jobs, and all people of color from entering the U.S., but that the ban probably wasn't intended to cover a white Christian minister. It's an abhorrent holding, long since vitiated by the court so far as the racial discrimination.

The case is often miscited for its obiter dicta on the U.S. being a Christian nation. David Brewer, who wrote that decision, denied that was ever the intent; worse, almost every point of history Brewer cited in his long desultory was incorrect.

Holy Trinity stood for racial discrimination. That's what we risk in endorsing the claim that the U.S. is a "Christian nation." We should be above that, as Americans.